Objectives
This lesson emphasizes the importance of a culture of ownership and engagement within the organization. It explains how the right organizational structure and governance models can be put in place to support the integration strategy and ensure quality assurance.
This lesson contains the following topics:
This section provides an introduction to the practice of empowerment. It covers the promotion of a culture of ownership and engagement within the organization.
The final phase of the SAP integration solutions consulting methodology deals mainly with nontechnical aspects of business integration and covers the organizational and operational structure of an integration practice.
The goal of the fourth phase of the SAP Integration Solution Advisory Methodology is to establish integration as a recognized discipline and to position integration as a strategic differentiator in your company. In addition, this phase aims to improve the operational structure of your integration practice and move to an agile approach to integration solution delivery. This includes, for example, democratizing integration delivery, establishing a culture of knowledge sharing and improving communication between (internal/external) development teams.
In addition to the known architect roles, the following personas are also required in this step:
At the end of the fourth phase of this methodology, you have created the following assets:
This section describes how to establish the right organizational structure to support the integration strategy. This structure includes the definition of roles, responsibilities, and processes.
Definition of integration roles, including responsibilities, and creation of an Integration Center of Excellence to establish business integration as a recognized discipline.
Enterprise integration is a team effort where employees of different roles perform specific tasks in the orchestration to achieve a common goal. For example, delivering integrated business applications or business processes that are integrated end-to-end.
To this end, the SAP Integration Solution Advisory Methodology contains a list of commonly used integration roles in organizations, together with their typical responsibilities and some example activities in an SAP context. The concrete definition of integration roles depends on your specific customer context. You can use the outlined integration roles as a starting point and adapt/extend them to your specific needs.
Sample task in an SAP context:
Sample task in an SAP context:
Sample task in an SAP context:
Sample task in an SAP context:
Sample task in an SAP context:
Sample task in an SAP context:
Sample task in an SAP context:
Sample task in an SAP context:
Sample task in an SAP context:
You also need an organizational unit that is responsible for your company's integration strategy and continuously develops it further. The SAP Integration Solution Advisory Methodology recommends the introduction of an Integration Center of Excellence. This is a cross-departmental team of experts from various disciplines with different perspectives - business units whose applications and data are directly affected by the integration, as well as representatives from compliance and security. The Integration Center of Excellence drives the introduction of the SAP Integration Solution Advisory Methodology in an organization. Therefore, this team is responsible for the following activities:
This team also handles the mentoring of the company's virtual integration community, which may include integration developers, citizen integrators, and a subset of API/application developers (working on integration-related developments) to set standards and use and promote expertise within the organization. It is important that the Integration Center of Excellence is well connected to other strategic IT units, for example, an Enterprise Architecture Board, and that senior management support is ensured.
Such an Integration Center of Excellence can optimize tactical integration projects. Also, it supports strategic initiatives by providing data access, insight and intelligence to business users, developers, executives, and data analysts through standardized and scalable APIs. This is achieved through accelerators that enable not only data access, but also data insights and intelligence and executive reporting.
To perform this step, use a template as you cannot define integration roles in terms of responsibilities and tasks in the integration assessment. However, a subset of these roles is reused as part of Integration Assessment. So, it provides role collections for an enterprise architect, an integration architect, and a business domain expert, which are the personas that use this tool.
The introduction of integration governance is described. This governance comprises the definition and implementation of guidelines, standards, and procedures for controlling and monitoring integration solutions.
Introduce an integration governance process to ensure that developers design integration scenarios based on agreed standards.
Define a clear integration strategy and ensure its implementation by your virtual integration community based on agreed standards. Provide consistent integration scenarios that support critical business processes. Integration governance must be part of IT governance and include clear responsibilities and escalation paths. Strategic decisions on integration architecture must be in line with the enterprise architecture strategy and made by the Integration Center of Excellence team in consultation with the Enterprise Architecture Board. The Chief Technology Officer has ultimate responsibility for decisions regarding enterprise architecture and technology selection.
The SAP Integration Solution Advisory Methodology contains several templates that you can use along a governance process for integration developments. The following graphic shows an example of an integration governance process, including the roles involved, the tasks per role, and the applicable accelerators.
This methodology supports integration developers in selecting suitable integration technologies and approaches according to established best practices. If existing technologies are not sufficient, they can turn to the Integration Center of Excellence. Integration governance must also fit into the overarching IT governance of the organization, the framework of which is defined by the chief technology officer and detailed by the integration architects of the center.
Methods for ensuring integration quality assurance are described. These methods include the monitoring, evaluation, and optimization of integration solutions to ensure high quality and reliability.
Integrate a simple integration checklist into your quality assurance processes to better support integration developers.
Quality assurance is essential in IT projects to ensure standards such as security and usability. Integration plays an important role and must be considered in all project phases, from planning to operation.
The SAP Integration Solution Advisory Methodology supports the definition of integration standards and promotes best practices and governance.
Testing is an essential part of quality assurance. Integration developments must follow an organization's established testing methodologies, including unit, integration, and regression testing as well as manual or automated testing for functional and nonfunctional requirements.
| Test type | Description | Example in an integration context |
|---|---|---|
| Unit testing | Verify the functional correctness of individual software modules. Tests are conducted by the respective developer. | Testing connectivity (configured APIs, connectors) - Testing mapping programs. |
| Integration testing | Verify the interfaces between components against a software design. | Testing of an integration scenario - Testing of replication batch jobs. |
| Regression testing | Finding defects after a major code change has occurred. Specifically, it seeks to uncover software regressions, as degraded or lost features, including old bugs that have come back. | Retesting existing integration scenarios after the upgrade of an integrated business application. |
Improve your quality assurance process with an integration quality assessment checklist. This measure aims to increase the quality of integration scenarios and train developers. The checklist can be used by integration teams as a self-service and the Integration Center of Excellence also offers coaching through interviews. Results are documented and assigned to test cases. The integration architects at the center are responsible for monitoring the checklist.
SAP offers a template for an integration quality checklist that is intended to supplement, but not replace, the classic integration test processes in a company. Integration tests are not supported by the integration assessment function of the SAP Integration Suite. However, SAP and SAP partners offer tools and services that enable integration testing, such as the Customer Test Service for the cloud integration function of SAP Integration Suite.
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